Meant to be Seen

Engadget.com are reporting the above, here's the quote:

"Details are pretty slim on this one at the moment, but PC Perspective is reporting that NVIDIA has snapped up the Utah-based start-up RayScale, a maker of ray tracing software. As PC Perspective points out, the move is made particularly interesting in light of some recent comments made by NVIDIA CTO David Kirk, who mused about the merging of ray tracing and rasterization into a "hybrid renderer" of sorts, but didn't offer any firm details on the company's plans at the time. No word on a price tag for the acquisition just yet, or any other details for that matter, but it seems like things should be getting a bit more official in the next few days.

Article:
http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc ... 296090771/ "

I'm not sure if this has any impact on the 3-D world but possibly somebody knows better?

Silversurfer

In my opinion, real time raytracing would mean a jump in photorealism like never before. Even the simplest geometry, let's say a sphere, rendered with conventional raytracing (using POV for example) is awesomely real to the eyes. More than real it's *surreal* to me. You can look for some pictures on the net or even try POV. It still exists and still is free. Raytracing lacks the cartoon feeling of nowadays real time graphics. It usually also combines Radiosity (see wikipedia) to render non real time scenes.

Lately I'm having a hard time playing FEAR (finally its price went down and bought it :P), it's really scary.... aaaargh :) I don't know if I would be able to play it with real time raytraced graphics.

Raytracing is heavily computing intensive. But suddenly everybody is talking about real time raytracing (even John Carmack, that's very good news). Let's see if someone comes up with something that is really raytracing and is really real time in a year or so. But then prepare yourself for a new hardware era.

real time raytracing is awesome and already available in some engines like the Ogre 3d engine which is free, though hardware support would be awesome. Still, I have to put things in perspective. The real time raytracing we will see will be very primitive when compared to the one provided by offline renderers (for making films and stuff), there a single frame can take minutes, hours or days to render. Though as PC's get faster we will see better and better RT raytracing.

crim3 wrote:In my opinion, real time raytracing would mean a jump in photorealism like never before. Even the simplest geometry, let's say a sphere, rendered with conventional raytracing (using POV for example) is awesomely real to the eyes. More than real it's *surreal* to me. You can look for some pictures on the net or even try POV. It still exists and still is free. Raytracing lacks the cartoon feeling of nowadays real time graphics. It usually also combines Radiosity (see wikipedia) to render non real time scenes.

Lately I'm having a hard time playing FEAR (finally its price went down and bought it ), it's really scary.... aaaargh I don't know if I would be able to play it with real time raytraced graphics.

Raytracing is heavily computing intensive. But suddenly everybody is talking about real time raytracing (even John Carmack, that's very good news). Let's see if someone comes up with something that is really raytracing and is really real time in a year or so. But then prepare yourself for a new hardware era.

Sorry about the delay in getting back on replying to this thread. Anyways all I can say is "Wow" to the POV information from the website, especially in the Christmas bobbles image, that is just breathtaking. Here's hoping that between this raytracing and physics technology NVIDIA has recently acquired they really surprise us in the next few years.